Power and Responsibility

– Higher levels of cognitive responsibility are positively correlated with expanded stages of consciousness evolution.
– The degree of our victim consciousness is inversely proportional to our level of cognitive responsibility.
– Our need for drama is directly related to our unwillingness to assume responsibility for our lives and especially our emotional experience.
– Our sense of personal empowerment (agency) is positively related to cognitive responsibility, and inversely related to our need for drama and identification as a victim.
– A key barrier to assuming higher levels of cognitive responsibility is the often unconscious fear of the emotional pain that we will (possibly) need to feel if we do so.

Is Artificial Consciousness Impossible?

In AI theory they refer to “the Jetson’s Fallacy.” As with the 1960’s futuristic cartoon show, many people today naively believe that AI is just going to walk beside us into the future. But no. It’s going to increasingly walk inside us. The interface of human and machine intelligence is going to become increasingly blurred. And don’t think that people won’t let it happen. The steps to get there will come one at a time. Many of us alive today might find it abhorrent to have a neural chip drilled into our skulls. But the shift won’t happen all at once. Each generation will likely take one step further towards cybernetic embodiment.

Reclaiming Your Power from the Machines in the Age of the Sick Click

It is helpful to think of the E-Word of media and social media as the mass monkey mind. In meditative traditions, the “monkey mind” is the term used to describe your chattering, unchecked inner world, which (if I may mix my metaphors) has a tendency to wander about indiscriminately like a blind man stumbling along a crowded street without a walking stick. The blind man keeps bumping into people, either cursing them or apologizing frantically in order to deflect their anger, even as the other pedestrians apologize or curse him back. Because he cannot see, the blind man doesn’t realise that all the other pedestrians are equally as blind, and all without their canes.

Healing the Human Species

Most of us will live and die in cultures that deny our fundamental nature. That is something we must come to understand, without giving our power away to such systems. We must learn to live with this fact. We must also learn to live and love in a world that rejects us. For if we in turn reject the world… we are back into the rage. The rage against humanity, the universe and God. And the trauma will persist.